Yii2 + PHP vs Ruby on Rails : When the Ruby Lost Its Shine

How the Ruby Lost It’s Shine

In order to know why, we need to look at the history. Once upon a time there was Java. The powerful virtual language to work on any platform. Except that there was a catch, it was too big, too powerful to work for web sites that simply served up bites of information. It’s Object Orientated background took too long for the lightning speed internet to get up.

Then came PHP, the hack and smash language. You wanted to go Hello world in 1 line of code. It was a script language that fired from the hip. Its’ fan loved it.

But there was one problem, it’s fast pace shoot first ask questions later lead to messy coding, programmers all over the shop and questionable programming structures.

Ruby Rises

That’s when Ruby came in and with it Rails. The first language that had its own framework. These meant good structures, components out of the box and lots of quick plugins. This was in the early 2000s.

PHP looked like it was going down… then

Frame Me

Already by mid-late 2006, other Frameworks started springing up. At first for PHP it was loose with some quick codes. Then as I was considering jumping to RoR, PHPCake popped out and I decided PHP wasn’t dead. It’s wasn’t a piece of cake, but it was getting interesting.

Ruby Loses Its Shine

In 2010, PHP developers were starting to take notice of RoR and hardcore loyalist were focusing on frameworks. Finally Yii1 came out and I found a framework that I was completely comfortable with. as well as really fast.

PHP also started to catchup with the development of PHP 5, which created an Object Oriented style hybrid. The advantage that Ruby had was gone. While PHP developers had the option to switch between OO or Hybrid.

2015 Yii2 Emerges

For me, Yii1 was great but it still felt missing in several areas. The alert wasn’t great, while it missed lots of helpers like dates and all that which you had to do yourself. This was naturally built back to the days of ‘DIY’ programming.

But Yii2 changed the game again. It has the speed, much better structure and front end bootstrap and jquery in built.

2016 Go

Ruby used to shine bright, but a lot of competition has come in and PHP hasn’t lagged behind. Improved PHP 7 performance and Yii2 which borrows lots of stuff from RoR means its a lot flatter.